A little of the new Spider-Man went an exhilaratingly long way in Captain America: Civil War last year. But a lot of him goes almost nowhere in this slack and spiritless solo escapade, spun off from an initially intriguing premise that deflates around you with a low whine as you watch, like a punctured bouncy castle.

The big, and theoretically cute, idea behind it is that Peter Parker – now played by the young British actor Tom Holland as a 15-year-old high schooler – has to balance his super-heroic duties with the more prosaic traumas of everyday teenage life. But the film’s action parts are staged with so little nerve or showmanship, and the coming-of-age ones so feebly emulsified from high-school comedies past, that you end up wondering if the two halves were assembled by different teams of genre specialists who somehow ended up with each other’s commissions by mistake.

Certainly, neither seems like a forte for director Jon Watts (Cop Car), the latest green-behind-the-ears Sundance type to have been handed the keys to a blockbuster along with, presumably, a stern warning from the owners to bring her back before dark with a full tank and scratch-free paintwork.

It’s a strategy that can pay dividends when the filmmaker in question is capable of crowbarring something of their own personality and predilections into the project – David Lowery’s plaintive, homespun Pete’s Dragon remake and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ brash and rompy Kong: Skull Island are two notable recent successes on that front. But there’s a stale-biscuit whiff of the focus group about this new Spider-Man: for a start, there’s nothing here to remotely bewilder or appall anyone in their 30s or above, which for a high-school film is a dereliction of duty.

Still, Holland makes a valiant go of it. At a baby-faced 21, the actor is the youngest of the three recent live-action Spider-Men by some distance, and the gawky buoyancy he brought to Civil War’s centrepiece battle makes its welcome return in Homecoming’s opening collage of smartphone video clips – shot by Peter as a kind of behind-the-scenes diary during the events of that film, and featuring the first of a handful of guest appearances from Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man. (As a licensing-rights-bending co-production between Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios, Homecoming officially ushers Spider-Man into the same cinematic universe as the Avengers.)

Jon Favreau, Robert Downey Jr and Tom Holland

It’s this genuinely charming sequence, rather than yet another do-over of the radioactive spider-bite, which sets the tone for what follows – along with a slapdash pre-credits introduction of the nemesis du jour, a blue-collar entrepreneur turned jet-pack-toting arms dealer called Adrian Toomes (an admirably engaged Michael Keaton), who will later become known as The Vulture.

But the film’s determination to fudge its scene-setting duties and get down to the business at hand feels less cheeky when you work out what that business actually is. The thrust of Homecoming turns out to be a series of superhero-themed variations on the old torn loyalties dilemma from countless high-school movies past, in which the big dance contest (or something) turns out to be on the same day as the final exam (or something else).

Michael Keaton as The Vulture

As such, Peter keeps bailing out of house parties, inter-school competitions, and even a late-night swim with his classroom crush Liz (Laura Harrier), in order thwart whichever part of the Vulture’s villainous scheme is currently in train. The two characters with the potential to jolt the film out of this rut – Peter’s doting Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and his sardonic classmate Michelle (an appealing turn from the former Disney Channel starlet Zendaya) – are, for the most part, exasperatingly sidelined.

Instead, the female voice Peter develops the richest relationship with belongs to "Karen" (Jennifer Connelly), the on-board computer in his dizzyingly high-tech new Spider-suit, provided by Stark Industries. That’s upshot number one of a Downey Jr. cameo, but the overabundance of gizmos – everything from "instant kill mode" to built-in satellite navigation – only serves to undermine one of the fundamental attractions of Spider-Man on film: the swooping intuitiveness of the character’s trapeze-like fluidity in flight (or, if you prefer, swing).

Sam Raimi’s noughties Spider-Man trilogy understood this to its core – it’s what led to indelible moments like Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst’s upside-down kiss – but even the Marc Webb/Andrew Garfield films, little-loved as they now seem to be, have a feel for spectacle that’s absent here.

It’s on the one occasion the film smashes Peter’s worlds together, rather than having him slingshot loopily between the two, that things finally start to bristle. In necessarily vague terms, it involves a plain-clothes encounter between Peter and Toomes in the context of a certain teenage rite of passage that would have been hair-raising enough without a supervillain present.

Laura Harrier and Tom Holland

Elsewhere, much of the high-school stuff revolves around Peter and his large, loud and apparently only friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), and their double act seems so desperate to be Superbad (2007) it stings. As for a recreation of the famous garden-to-garden dash from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1987), it might have felt less like a desperate inducement to think of Homecoming as a John Hughes film with superpowers if Peter didn’t run past the original scene from Hughes’s film playing on a television set.

Paying homage is one thing, but for all his supposed new-found youthfulness, this Spider-Man can feel a little too cobwebby for comfort.